May 23, 2012
Marvel Comics is once again showing its support for diverse characters in its comics. The comic book giant’s first openly gay character, Northstar in Astonishing X-Men, is going to propose to his longtime partner in the next issue. It will also be the first gay marriage scene in a Marvel series. Northstar, who is a ...
May 21, 2012
After you get engaged, it’s easy to become bogged down with planning the wedding, if you choose to have one. But while being bombarded with emails about chair covers (seriously, never give your email address to anyone in this industry), occasionally it dawns on one that hey, one is going to be married after all ...
May 7, 2012
The market for weddings in Britain is now valued at 7.5 billion pounds a year. The amount Brits spend on weddings has more than doubled since the ’80s. Now, some experts are claiming that this wedding day extravagance only leads to a more likely divorce. High Court Judge Sir Paul Coleridge said last week that ...
April 30, 2012
Marrying an old rich guy and divorcing him may no longer be the only way to make a profit off nuptials. A US insurance company will pay you to work out your problems and stay married. SafeGuard Guarantee Corp. will offer marriage insurance that protects couples who get divorced, but will also give couples an ...
April 27, 2012
Bloody Facebook. I knew there was a reason I became a reluctant convert. It’s all very well having hilarious banter with my actual friends, who are an international crowd, but there’s the well-documented difficulty of “people from the past.” I don’t mean a dark, shady past like everyone on Days of our Lives reveals just ...
Tags: Facebook,
feminism,
independent women,
marital status,
marriage,
old friends,
privacy,
single,
singleton,
the fuming feminist,
women's value
April 23, 2012
Once again, I have lost faith in humanity. Admittedly, I lose faith in humanity fairly easily and often (just last week, a clip from Jackass: The Movie nearly reduced me to tears over the futility of existence). But nothing – nothing! – has compromised my faith in humankind as much as researching this article about ...
Tags: bachelor party,
bachelorette party,
bucks night,
cock,
feminist wedding,
hen do,
Lifting The Veil,
male stripper,
marriage,
penis,
phallus,
singledom,
stag,
stagette,
wedding planning
April 10, 2012
Achmat Dangor’s novel Bitter Fruit begins in post-apartheid South Africa, when Silas spots the police lieutenant who raped Lydia nearly twenty years before. The novel follows the lives of the former activists, now married and seemingly settled into middle class life with a teenage son and a close circle of friends. The central themes are ...
April 9, 2012
When my grandmother got married in the 1950s, it wasn’t only for love. Marriage had a more practical purpose in those days: to secure a woman’s social status. The newest generation of brides may finally break the age-old rags-to-riches fairytale stereotype that insists a woman marry an older and wealthier gentleman. In fact, they may ...
Tags: bring home the bacon,
education,
income,
marriage,
marry for love,
marry for money,
marrying down,
marrying up,
money,
salary,
social class,
women earn more than men
April 3, 2012
I re-read Carol Shields when I want to find new layers to a familiar story. The Republic of Love lacks the gravitas of Shields’ more acclaimed novels, but it reinvents a basic love story with subtlety and wit. Familiarity underpins the lives of the interlinked characters, including the city, Winnipeg, which functions as both a ...
Tags: book review,
Carol Shields,
love story,
lovers,
marriage,
sex,
singledom,
singleton,
The Republic of Love,
Tuesday book club,
Winnipeg
March 27, 2012
Anne Fine’s Fly in the Ointment takes me quickly through the life of Lois, whose son is dead after a lengthy stint of heroin use and whose husband has left her without saying goodbye. Indifferent to the dull, unpleasant husband and grieving for her son, Lois interrupts her second life of solitude and simple pleasures ...